Forget Georgia: Why Tuesday’s Other Special Election Should Terrify Republicans

While Trump was cheering Karen Handel, the G.O.P. just learned a hard lesson in South Carolina.

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Handel thanks her supporters in her victory speech after defeating Jon Ossoff in the special election.

By Jessica McGowan/Getty Images.

All politics may be local, but political narratives are always national. That went double for the special election Tuesday between Republican candidate Karen Handel and Democratic upstart Jon Ossoff, who both ran to represent Georgia’s affluent Sixth District in what quickly became the most expensive congressional race in history and was widely seen as a referendum on Donald Trump. So it came as no surprise when, after Handel edged out Ossoff by 3.8 points, the president and his allies were quick to declare the victory proof of voters’ support for Trumpism and the Republican Party.

Ahead of the GA6 election, political strategists were looking to the Ossoff-Handel race for evidence of a coming Democratic wave in 2018. Former R.N.C. communications director Doug Heye said a victory for Ossoff would heighten existing concerns within the ranks that Trump’s historic unpopularity could cost the party its majority in Congress. Now, in the wake of Handel’s win, some of those fears have been allayed. Trump, one top G.O.P. strategist told me in a recent interview, “is neither a support beam or an anchor on Republicans.”

Handel’s victory also provides a potential playbook for vulnerable Republicans in 2018. The candidate never fully embraced Trump, but she didn’t run away from him either, instead focusing her efforts on attacking Ossoff and his credentials. “Everybody does better being closer to [Trump] than trying to be farther away, because the closer they are to him, the better he will do because we’re all unified. And if Trump goes up two points, you go up two points,” the strategist said in a separate interview. “If he goes down and you try and break with him, you just lose some of the Republicans that actually like him and you really don’t pick anybody up on this side.”

But arguing that Handel’s victory portends a rosy midterm election for the G.O.P. would be imprudent. As the strategist explained, “Every campaign is a unique expression of the current contours of the electorate.” And though Trump only edged out Hillary Clinton by 1.5 percentage points in Georgia’s Sixth last November, the seat’s former occupant, current Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, won the district seven times, securing a minimum of 61 percent of the vote each time. And while the country was focused on the race in Georgia, a separate special election in South Carolina, to fill White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s former seat, suggests that the party’s prospects are weaker than Ossoff’s loss suggests.

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With a paltry $250,000 from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democrat Archie Parnellcame within four points of his G.O.P. opponent, Ralph Norman, in South Carolina’s Fifth District on Tuesday, where Trump beat Clinton by 18 points last November and Mulvaney won re-election by 21 points. And so while Trump and co. are busy heralding Handel’s victory as proof that the “Make America Great Again” agenda still has traction, vulnerable G.O.P. congressmen might see the tight South Carolina race as reason to begin establishing a safe distance from the president. “The problem for the people in Congress is that they have to react now. They have to start their planning now,” Andrew Smith, a political-science professor and the director of the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire, said in a recent interview.

Ultimately, the actual results of these special elections—which don’t change the makeup of Congress—matter less than the way they are perceived in Washington. In other words, it is about whether it is the Republican or the Democratic narrative that sticks. “Politics in Washington is driven by fear, and it’s fear of not getting elected,” Smith said. “That’s kinda the thing you pay attention to, how frightened these people are.”

Not to mention that with $50 million poured into the Georgia race, Handel garnered publicity beyond what any congressional candidates will be able to boast come 2018. Handel and Ossoff had nationwide name recognition—a luxury few congressmen will have during the midterms. “Nobody has a sense of what to do, because they’ve inherited all the downsides of Trump and none of the up. They don’t have the 100 percent name I.D., the celebrity status, all that other shit,” Republican strategist and well-known anti-Trumper Rick Wilson told me last week. “They have a much higher hill to climb and a much tougher hill to climb, in their races. The Republican voters that love Trump don’t necessarily love them. In fact, people who are pure Trump voters, they hate Republicans just about as much as they hate the Democrats. They hate the swamp, they hate the establishment.”

No doubt, Ossoff’s defeat is a blow to Democrats—particularly after his strong finish in the primary—but to say the party and the anti-Trump resistance is doomed would be premature.

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